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One month later: Google Lively? Not so much

Google's Lively is a platform for web-based, 3D chat rooms that can be easily …

In July, Google released Lively, a "Second Life in the browser" plug-in that lets anyone embed a basic 3D chat realm on a website or blog. We strolled through Google's new social world back then and found that, possibly as a result of the "20 percent time" Google allows employees to spend on projects like this, Lively seemed to be 20 percent done. Now, a month later, we took another look to see if Lively is living up to its name.

For those who haven't experienced it yet, Lively is the search giant's attempt to bring the personalization and interactivity of a 3D virtual realm into the browser. Marketed under a wonderfully catchy slogan—"Create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design"—Lively runs only via a plug-in on Windows Vista/XP in IE or Firefox. Users are able to customize their appearance by building a character using premade components, and web site owners can create their own room, embed it in their site, and, ideally, use it as a sort of virtual community. Simple blog comments and smiley faces may have seemed limiting to someone at Google, and apparently a full 3D worlds with avatars, text bubbles, and interactive environments seemed like the next logical step.

As it's a Google product, Lively netted the typical press attention from the usual outlets (ahem), and some sites embedded one of Lively's launch rooms. But, from what we can tell, that's about as far as it went. There doesn't seem to be much activity in most of the rooms we checked out over the past week; besides the obligatory rooms like "Sexy Babes Club," most of the new rooms listed at Lively's site don't claim more than double-digit visitors. Outside of following links from Lively's product page, we weren't able to find Lively rooms being used in sites or blog posts.

So what's wrong? Is the web just not ready to embrace interactive realms where commenters can yell and wrestle each other while hiding behind animated 3D avatars? The more likely answer is that Lively's growth is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It was released under Google's disclaimer of being a "20 percent project," but Lively is an ambitious project that targets unproven interactive web technology. Google obviously knows it needs to build a community that can help it figure out how a rich, web-based interactive environment like this should operate, but Lively is extremely unpolished and buggy, so even early adopters seem to be passing it by.

Lively is in a digital chicken versus egg conundrum: it needs users to direct its improvement, but it's currently in such a rough state that it frightens away users. Considering its potential for monetization, this probably isn't a project that Google will simply give up on. 3D environments have been a big hit in gaming, and Google is the obvious candidate to bring the technology to the web and turn it into a money maker. It isn't hard to imagine video ads playing on the wall of a blog's Lively room while visitors chat about the latest post. Google needs to do a lot of work and UI improvements, though, if Lively is going to pioneer that future for the web.